Category Archives: culture

The Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan: Is Community Engagement the Key?

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By Robert J. Burrowes

I have just read a superb book by Mark Isaacs, an Australian who has documented several years of effort by a group of incredibly committed young people in Afghanistan to build peace in that war-torn country the only way it can be built: by learning, living and sharing peace.

The book, titled The Kabul Peace House: How a Group of Young Afghans are Daring to Dream in a Land of War, records in considerable detail the struggle, both internal and external, to generate a peaceful future in Afghanistan. Some might consider this vision naive, others courageous, but few would doubt the simple reality: it is slow, daunting, incredibly difficult, often saddening, frightening, infuriating or painful, sometimes uplifting or hilarious and, just occasionally, utterly rewarding.

This is a human story written by a person who knows how to listen and to observe. And because the subject is about a group of ordinary Afghans and their mentor doing their best in the struggle to end one of the longest wars in human history, it is a story that is well worth reading.

This story is embedded in a combination of (brief) historical background on Afghanistan’s longstanding and central role in imperial geopolitics (including during ‘The Great Game’ of the 19th century) and more recent history on the progressive modernity of Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979 which was followed by an ongoing and multifaceted war in which the United States has played the most damaging role since its invasion of the country in 2001. But the background also includes a description of the ethnic diversity throughout the country, the role of religion and gender relations (and the challenges these social parameters present), as well as commentary on the social, economic and political regression as a result of the war’s many adverse impacts. So the book weaves a lot of strands into a compelling story of nonviolent resistance and regeneration against almost overwhelming odds.

However, that is not all. Given that all of the Afghans in this visionary community have each been traumatized by their unique experience of war, the book doesn’t shy away from describing the challenges this presents both to them personally and to the community, including its mentor and even some of the community’s many international visitors.

Most of the community members – whether Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Sayyid, Pashai… – have suffered serious loss during the war, especially those members who have had family and other relatives killed, or worse. Worse? you might ask. What is worse than death? Well, after reading this book, you will better understand that the context and the manner of death mean a great deal psychologically. None of the victims of this war died peacefully in their sleep after long and meaningful lives and this is just one part of the psychological trauma suffered by so many in this particular community but also in wider Afghan society.

So what does this community in Kabul do? Well, throughout its evolution and many manifestations, the community has done many things including run a variety of projects intended to foster understanding, cooperation and learning: nurture mutual respect among the diversity of people that constitute its membership, teach some of its members to read and write and facilitate learning opportunities in other contexts, teach the meaning and practice of nonviolence, give street kids the chance to learn skills that will make them employable, make duvets to give to people who go cold in Afghanistan’s freezing winters, teach and practice permaculture, organize protests against the war (including by flying kites instead of drones), and generally working to create a world that is green, equal and nonviolent.

If you think this sounds all good and straightforward, given slowly spreading acceptance of such ideas elsewhere (in some circles at least), then you might have underestimated their radical nature in a society in which ideas about nonviolence, equality and sustainability have, for the most part, not been previously encountered and have certainly not taken root. Isaacs records the observations of the group’s mentor on these subjects: ‘Over the years I have seen how the volunteers have changed within their personal lives, even if it means distancing themselves from the traditions of their own family…. But on a public level it’s much slower.’

This is understandable. As Isaacs notes, even in ordinary conversation and group discussions, ‘the weight of resistance, the taboos and the self-censorship’ made an impact on him. In a culture in which, in 2015, a woman in her twenties was stoned, her body run over by a car and then dumped in a river and set on fire because a mullah falsely accused her of burning the Quran, there is a long way to go.

One of the things that I found most compelling about the book is the occasional ‘biography’ of one of the community’s main characters. Given pseudonyms to avoid possible adverse repercussions, these stories provide real insight into the lives of certain community members and their struggle to leave home (in some cases), to join the community, to find their place within it and gain acceptance by the other members.

Some, like Hojar, are more outspoken and this, for a woman, is unusual in itself. Hojar is deeply aware of the gender inequality and violence against women in Afghanistan and will talk about it. This inspires other women, like Tara, who have not experienced this outspokenness before.

But Hojar’s life had started differently, in the mountains where, as a teenager, she was getting up at 3am to start baking bread for her four snoring brothers before milking the goats and sheep. ‘I am not a woman’, she thought, ‘I am a slave’. Fortunately and unusually, Hojar’s parents supported her desire to not marry at 13 or 15, but to continue her education and follow her dreams. It’s a long, painful, terrifying and fascinating journey but Hojar ended up in this novel community experiment in Kabul where her now college-educated talent was highly valued and put to wonderful use. She has my utmost admiration.

Unlike Hojar, other community members, like Horse, originally a shepherd in the mountains, are more circumspect on gender equality and other issues. But this doesn’t mean that Horse is not active, at times playing roles in the networking team, the accounts team and, particularly, as coordinator of the food cooperative which provided monthly gifts of food to the impoverished families of one hundred children who studied at the community’s street kids school. If you think raising donations to pay for this food was easy, particularly given the community decision to avoid the international aid sector to try to encourage Afghans to help their fellow Afghans, when more than half of the population lived below the poverty line and unemployment was at 40%, you will find it compelling to read how the teenaged Horse struggled with the monumental range of challenges he faced in that particular role. He has my admiration too.

Insaan, a doctor who mentors the community, provides a compelling story as well. Originally from another country, in 2002 a consultation with a patient at his successful medical practice inspired him to depart some time later. After spending more than two years in Pakistan, working with refugees from Afghanistan, he went to Afghanistan in 2004 to work for an international NGO in public health education in its central mountainous region.

His ongoing experience in this role, however, taught him that every problem the villagers faced had its origins in the war. And this underpinned his gradual transformation from health professional to peace activist. He discovered Thoreau, Gandhi and King, among others, and ‘became convinced of the power of love’. By 2008, Insaan had initiated his first multi-ethnic live-in community (although he did not live in it himself) in the mountains but in 2011, when his house was deliberately burned down, he departed for Kabul determined to restart the peace work he had begun in the mountains.

Starting with three young people who accompanied him from the mountains, the first manifestation of a live-in peace community in Kabul was soon underway. Endlessly paying attention, trying to provide guidance, reconcile those in conflict, and even withstanding threats of violence, Insaan’s love has undoubtedly been the glue that has held the growing and evolving community together. But not without cost. At times, Insaan has struggled, emotionally and otherwise, to survive in this perpetual war zone as the key figure holding this loving experiment together. He is a truly remarkable human being.

And it is because of the trauma that he and each of the other community members has suffered, that I hope that, in future, they can somehow dedicate time to their own personal, emotional healing. See ‘Putting Feelings First’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. There is no better investment for any human being than to spend time consciously focusing on feeling the fear, pain, anger and sadness that we are taught and terrorized into suppressing during childhood (so that we become the obedient slaves that our society wants). Given the extraordinary violence that the people of Afghanistan have suffered and are still suffering, the value of making this investment would be even greater.

Anyway, if you want to read an account of the deeply personal human costs of war, and what one community is doing about it, read this book. It isn’t all pretty but, somehow, this remarkable community, through all of its manifestations over many years, its successes and failures, manages to inspire one with the sense that while those insane humans who spend their time planning, justifying, fighting and profiting from wars against people in other countries, those people on the receiving end of their violence are capable of visioning a better tomorrow and working to achieve it. No matter how difficult or how long it takes. Moreover, we can help too. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

So allow yourself to be inspired by a group of young people, each of whom has lived their entire life in a country at war both with itself and with foreign countries, but has refused to submit to the predominant delusion that violence is the way out.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Believing Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide is the Real Conspiracy Theory

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Is a murder committed more heinous than a suicide allowed? In its act, sure. In this context? NO.

An “unlucky accident” like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB.

It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an “unlucky accident” like this in a non-corrupt State.

– Ben Hunt, I’m a Superstitious Man

It’s entirely fitting that the death of Jeffrey Epstein is as disturbing, shady, bizarre and seemingly inexplicable as the rest of his life. It seems as if one could research this wretched man’s time on earth for years and still come up with more questions than answers. An unfortunate reality complicated by the fact we don’t have a mass media particularly interested in asking any of the big questions, such as:

  • Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Why isn’t she in custody and was she a Mossad spy like her late father Robert Maxwell?
  • Explain the details of the relationship between Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein? Why does it seem as if Wexner helped set Epstein up with the appearance of extraordinary wealth, yet no one seems to know how Epstein actually came into all his money?

It appears sexually abusing children and accumulating associated blackmail on the rich and powerful was a full-time job for Epstein, so who was actually bankrolling/overseeing this operation? Was it Wexner, somebody else, or was it an intelligence agency as Alex Acosta claims he was told? Seems kind of important to get to the bottom of this.

I could go on and on, but then this would become a book. Rather, the purpose of this post is to highlight the outlandishness surrounding many of the details (or lack thereof) surrounding Epstein’s death a week ago in a Department of Justice operated New York City prison.

Indeed, what you’d have to believe in order to think this was a simple suicide is the actual conspiracy theory. 

Let’s begin with the initial attack, which happened three weeks before his death.

The Initial Attack
As everybody knows, on July 23, Jeffrey Epstein was found in a fetal position, semi-conscious, on the floor of his cell with neck injuries. His cellmate at the time was Nicholas Tartaglione, a former New York police officer who was arrested in December 2016 on charges of killing four men in a drug distribution conspiracy.

There was a giant haze surrounding this incident up until the moment of Epstein’s death, with everyone unsure whether he was attacked or if it was a suicide attempt. According to a report by NBC News, Tartaglione was subsequently cleared the day before Epstein was found dead. I suppose that means the initial attack was belatedly ruled a suicide attempt, but why did it take so long to figure that out? It took far less time to rule Epstein’s suspicious death a suicide.

Circumstances at the Prison Surrounding the Death
Either the stars all aligned perfectly for the most important prisoner in America to kill himself on that day, or he was somehow murdered to shield an extensive list of some of the most wealthy and powerful people on earth. Decide for yourself.

– One of Epstein’s Guards Was Not a Corrections Officer

The AP reported:

A person familiar with operations at the federal jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself says one of the two people guarding him the night he died wasn’t a correctional officer.

The person wasn’t authorized to disclose information about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person said Epstein hanged himself with a bedsheet, days after being taken off a suicide watch.

Federal prisons facing shortages of fully trained guards have resorted to having other types of support staff fill in for correctional officers, including clerical workers and teachers.

– Both of the Guards Fell Asleep at the Exact Same Time Giving Epstein a Chance to Die

Guards were supposed to have checked on Epstein every 30 minutes, but rather both of them fell asleep for 3 hours during the window of Epstein’s death.

Via Business Insider:

The two prison guards assigned to monitor Jeffrey Epstein in a high-security jail fell asleep for three hours, the night he died of an apparent suicide, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed officials…

According to reports, there were multiple breaches in protocol regarding the supervision of Epstein: prison guards were required to check on Epstein every 30 minutes, which they failed to do, officials told The Times, and Epstein was being housed alone after his cellmate was transferred and was not replaced.

– Epstein Guards Suspected of Falsifying Logs

AP reports:

A person familiar with the probe of Jeffrey Epstein’s death at a federal jail says guards are suspected of falsifying log entries to show they were checking on inmates in his unit every half hour, when they actually weren’t.

– Key People at the Prison Are Not Cooperating with the FBI

CNN reports

Even top officials in the department have been frustrated by their inability to get some answers from the prison, in part because initial answers turned out to be inaccurate in some cases…

The FBI probe is complicated by the fact that key people involved aren’t cooperating, people briefed on the matter say.

– Epstein Was Taken off Suicide Watch Less Than a Week After His Initial Suicide Attempt

New York Magazine reports:

Epstein was taken off of suicide watch on July 29 and returned to the MCC’s special housing unit after a psychiatric evaluation determined he was no longer at risk of harming himself. The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein’s lawyers had requested he be removed from suicide watch.

– Epstein’s Cellmate Was Removed the Day Before Epstein Died

This makes no sense, unless you’re trying to create the perfect conditions for Epstein to die.

Via CNN:

In one instance over the weekend, officials believed the former Epstein cellmate had been released on bail. But it turns out he had been moved to another facility, one person briefed on the matter said. One of the first tasks for FBI agents this week was interviewing that former cellmate, who could provide information on Epstein’s behavior in the days before his suicide.

Who was Epstein’s cellmate before he died? After the first incident, it was revealed almost immediately who his cellmate was, but there’s been little to no details about the second cellmate. Who was he and what does he have to say?

– At Least Eight Jail Officials Knew Jeffrey Epstein Was Not to Be Left Alone in Cell

Just total insanity. The official narrative gets increasingly ridiculous by the day.

Via The Washington Post:

At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive — not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers — has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations. They declined to identify the eight…

The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.

“It’s perplexing,” said Robert Hood, a former warden at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. “If people were given instructions that Epstein should not be left alone, I don’t understand how they were not followed.”

It’s only perplexing if you go into it thinking it was a suicide.

Details Surrounding the Death Itself

– Epstein Hung Himself from a Bunkbed 

Via The Washington Post:

Epstein, 66, was found in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Saturday morning, and an official said he hanged himself with a bedsheet attached to the top of a bunk bed. Epstein was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The bunkbed was conveniently available due to the fact his cellmate was inexplicably moved a day before.

– Epstein Suffered Multiple Breaks in His Neck Bones, Which Is More Common in Homicides

Also via The Washington Post:

An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.

Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.

– Little to No Details About Prison Camera Footage 

I assume some narrative will emerge here, but it’s already been too long for my comfort. We had all sorts of details emerge in the days following Epstein’s death, but almost nothing regarding the crucial hallway camera footage in the prison. This is something investigators would likely check immediately so why didn’t they, or if they did, why is it taking so long to inform the public?

Even Epstein’s lawyers seem confused as to whether the video footage exists.

Here is part of a statement from Epstein’s attorneys via NBC News:

“It is indisputable that the authorities violated their own protocols. The defense team fully intends to conduct its own independent and complete investigation into the circumstances and cause of Mr. Epstein’s death including if necessary legal action to view the pivotal videos — if they exist as they should — of the area proximate to Mr. Epstein’s cell during the time period leading to his death.”

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the NYC Medical Examiners Office, which ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, has a pretty sordid history.

Check out the following from a 2014 New York Post article, Lost Bodies, Wasted Money: Inside NYC’s Medical Examiner’s Office

The city Medical Examiner’s Office is a mess — plagued with errors, including bodies being lost, mistakenly cremated or wrongly donated to science — while millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on plans and equipment useful only in a mass disaster…

Meanwhile, insiders say ME chiefs, caught up in the glamor of disaster, neglect the agency’s primary mission.

“They can’t take care of day-to-day business. They play war games,” one said.

The ME’s Office, with 625 employees and a $63.6 million budget, has a history of criminality, waste and incompetence.

The ME’s former chief of management information systems, Natarajan “Raju” Venkataram, and his co-worker girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, were busted in 2005 for embezzling more than $9 million from a $11.4 million FEMA grant meant to track and identify remains of 9/11 victims.

And bosses take lavish taxpayer-funded trips to conferences and symposiums.

Frank DePaolo, assistant commissioner for emergency management, has traveled to Las Vegas, the Hague, Hong Kong and Israel. Chief of Staff Barbara Butcher has gone to Croatia and Thailand…

The number of investigators, who examine bodies at death scenes, was slashed from about 40 to 20, among other cuts, they said.

“We’re told to do more with less, but the work is suffering,” one said.

Here’s some more while we’re at it:

 

If after everything I’ve highlighted, you still believe this was a simple suicide that’s fine. Anything is possible, but it really doesn’t matter. Even if it was mere incompetence that allowed a suicide to occur, this still demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that the federal government is incapable or unwilling to protect the public.

The Epstein case was and remains a matter of extreme public interest since this was a man who systematically sexually abused and trafficked children while closely associating with, and collecting blackmail on, a large slew of the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet. If the government can’t protect you from that, and it most certainly went out of its way to deny justice for this criminal over decades including within prison itself, then you can’t trust the government for anything. As such, whenever the feds claim they’re doing something extreme to protect you, whether it’s mass surveillance or encryption backdoors, you can be 100% sure it is a giant heap of stinking bullshit.

The narrative now being formed is that it was all just a lot of incompetence. That the guards were tired and overworked. We’re also being told that it’s normal for an inmate on suicide watch to come off after a few days, but Jeffrey Epstein was not a normal inmate. Epstein and the people around him belong to a class I refer to as super predators, which are the most dangerous predators in society because their elite connections allow them to get away with anything and everything.

It’s become completely clear that rather than stopping such people and their criminal rings, the U.S. government protects them and ensures no justice is ever served upon them, even up to their last breath.

Our government isn’t there to protect us, save us or dispense any justice. Instead, it seemingly exists to protect, serve and encourage the elite criminal rings operating around us in plain sight, whether it’s bank CEOs or pedophile sex traffickers with apparent intelligence links.

We are truly ruled by gangsters.

Offering Choice but Delivering Tyranny: The Corporate Capture of Agriculture

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

Many lobbyists talk a lot about critics of genetic engineering technology denying choice to farmers. They say that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies to maximise choice and options.

At the same time, somewhat ironically, they decry organic agriculture and proven agroecological approaches, presumably because these practices have no need for the proprietary inputs of the global agrochemical/agritech corporations they are in bed with.

And presumably because agroecology represents liberation from the tyranny of these profiteering, environment-damaging global conglomerates.

It is fine to talk about ‘choice’ but we do not want to end up offering a false choice (rolling out technologies that have little value and only serve to benefit those who control the technology), to unleash an innovation that has an adverse impact on others or to manipulate a situation whereby only one option is available because other options have been deliberately removed. And we would certainly not wish to roll out a technology that traps farmers on a treadmill that they find difficult to get off.

Surely, a responsible approach for rolling out important (potentially transformative) technologies would have to consider associated risks, including social, economic and health impacts.

Take the impact of the Green Revolution in India, for instance. Sold on the promise that hybrid seeds and associated chemical inputs would enhance food security on the basis of higher productivity, agriculture was transformed, especially in Punjab. But to gain access to seeds and chemicals many farmers had to take out loans and debt became (and remains) a constant worry.

Many became impoverished and social relations within rural communities were radically altered: previously, farmers would save and exchange seeds but now they became dependent on unscrupulous money lenders, banks and seed manufacturers and suppliers. Vandana Shiva in The Violence of the Green Revolution (1989) describes the social marginalisation and violence that accompanied the process.

On a macro level, the Green Revolution conveniently became tied to an international (neo-colonial) system of trade based on chemical-dependent agro-export mono-cropping linked to loans, sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF structural adjustment (privatisation/deregulation) directives.

Many countries in the Global South were deliberately turned into food deficit regions, dependent on (US) agricultural imports and strings-attached aid.

The process led to the massive displacement of the peasantry and, according to the academics Eric Holt-Giménez et al, (Food rebellions: Crisis and the hunger for Justice, 2009), the consolidation of the global agri-food oligopolies and a shift in the global flow of food: developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s; they were importing $11 billion a year by 2004.

And it’s not as though the Green Revolution delivered on its promises.

In India, it merely led to more wheat in the diet, while food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased (see New Histories of the Green Revolution by Glenn Stone). And, as described by Bhaskar Save in his open letter (2006) to officials, it had dire consequences for diets, the environment, farming, health and rural communities.

The ethics of the Green Revolution – at least it was rolled out with little consideration for these impacts – leave much to be desired.

As the push to drive GM crops into India’s fields continues (the second coming of the green revolution – the gene revolution), we should therefore take heed. To date, the track record of GMOs is unimpressive, but the adverse effects on many smallholder farmers are already apparent (see Hybrid Bt cotton: a stranglehold on subsistence farmers in India by A P Gutierrez).

Aside from looking at the consequences of technology roll outs, we should, when discussing choice, also account for the procedures and decisions that were made which resulted in technologies coming to market in the first place.

Steven Druker, in his book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, argues that the decision to commercialise GM seeds and food in the US amounted to a subversion of processes put in place to serve the public interest.

The result has been a technology roll out which could result (is resulting) in fundamental changes to the genetic core of the world’s food. This decision ultimately benefited Monsanto’s bottom line and helped the US gain further leverage over global agriculture.

We must therefore put glib talk of the denial of technology by critics to one side if we are to engage in a proper discussion of choice. Any such discussion would account for the nature of the global food system and the dynamics and policies that shape it. This would include looking at how global corporations have captured the policy agenda for agriculture, including key national and international policy-making bodies, and the role of the WTO and World Bank.

Choice is also about the options that could be made available, but which have been closed off or are not even considered. In Ethiopia, for example, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions.

However, in places where global agribusiness/agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions, their interests prevail. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policymakers’ mindsets and mainstream discourse.

As a result, agroecological approaches are marginalised and receive scant attention and support.

Monsanto had a leading role in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies. The global food processing industry wrote the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.

Whether it involves Codex or the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring (destroying) Indian agriculture, the powerful agribusiness/food lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers and sets the policy agenda.

From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global supply chain dominated by powerful corporations.

We have the destruction of indigenous farming in Africa as well as the ongoing dismantling of Indian agriculture and the deliberate impoverishment of Indian farmers at the behest of transnational agribusiness. Where is the democratic ‘choice’?

It has been usurped by corporate-driven Word Bank bondage (India is its biggest debtor in the bank’s history) and by a trade deal with the US that sacrificed Indian farmers for the sake of developing its nuclear sector.

Similarly, ‘aid’ packages for Ukraine – on the back of a US-supported coup – are contingent on Western corporations taking over strategic aspects of the economy. And agribusiness interests are at the forefront. Something which neoliberal apologists are silent on as they propagandise about choice, and democracy.

Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto/Bayer. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto.

India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is possibly behind the ongoing strategy to commercialise GM mustard in India. Whether on the back of militarism, secretive trade deals or strings-attached loans, global food and agribusiness conglomerates secure their interests and have scant regard for choice or democracy.

The ongoing aim is to displace localised, indigenous methods of food production and allow transnational companies to take over, tying farmers and regions to a system of globalised production and supply chains dominated by large agribusiness and retail interests. Global corporations with the backing of their host states, are taking over food and agriculture nation by nation.

Many government officials, the media and opinion leaders take this process as a given. They also accept that (corrupt) profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’).

There is the premise that water, seeds, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to these conglomerates to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

Ripping land from peasants and displacing highly diverse and productive smallholder agriculture, rolling out very profitable but damaging technologies, externalising the huge social, environmental and health costs of the prevailing neoliberal food system and entire nations being subjected to the policies outlined above: how is any of it serving the needs of humanity?

It is not. Food is becoming denutrified, unhealthy and poisoned with chemicals and diets are becoming less diverse. There is a loss of plant and insect diversity, which threatens food security, soils are being degraded, water tables polluted and depleted and millions of smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production, are being pushed into debt in places like India and squeezed off their land and out of farming.

It is time to place natural assets under local ownership and to develop them in the public interest according to agroecological principles. This involves looking beyond the industrial yield-output paradigm and adopting a systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for local food security and sovereignty, cropping patterns to ensure diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and good soil structure. It also involves pushing back against the large corporations that hold sway over the global food system and more generally challenging the leverage that private capital has over all our lives.

That’s how you ensure liberation from tyranny and support genuine choice.

 

Colin Todhunter is an independent journalist who writes on development, environmental issues, politics, food and agriculture. He was named in August 2018 by Transcend Media Services as one of 400 Living Peace and Justice Leaders and Models in recognition of his journalism. 

Biden’s Brain Is Swiss Cheese And It’s Creepy That We’re Not Talking About It

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

I didn’t watch the last Democratic presidential primary debates because I figured that without Tulsi Gabbard in there shaking things up it would be a boring, vapid parade of insubstantial verbal foam, and I love myself too much to go through such a horrible ordeal. By all accounts my prediction was correct, but I did miss one thing that’s been making the rounds in video clips for the last couple of days which I find absolutely bizarre.

Most of you have probably heard about Biden’s infamous “record player” comment by now, but for those of you who missed it, Biden was asked by debate moderator Linsey Davis to defend some comments he made about America’s problems with racism in the 1970s, and he responded by essentially saying that Black people don’t know how to raise their kids so they need to be taught how by social workers. Biden has been receiving mainstream criticism for his racist and paternalistic position, along with plenty of mockery for saying that parents need to be told to “make sure you have the record player on at night” so that kids hear enough words in early childhood.

It is pretty clear that Biden was trying to communicate an idea that is premised on a deeply racist and condescending worldview, so it’s to be expected that people would want to talk about that. It’s also to be expected that people would be making jokes about how the cute old man said “record player” like a grandpa. But what isn’t being discussed nearly enough is the fact that what Biden said was also a barely coherent, garbled word salad stumbling out of a brain that is clearly being eaten alive by a very serious neurological disease.

I’ve typed out a transcript of what Biden actually said, verbatim. There are no typos. I’ve also noted where Biden closes his eyes, probably to concentrate, which he does whenever he seems to be struggling especially hard to string words together. Try to read through it slowly, word-for-word, resisting the instinct to mentally re-frame it into something more coherent:

“Well they have to deal with the– Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a position where– Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal [closes eyes] raise to getting out– the sixty-thousand dollar level. 

“Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the–[closes eyes] the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need–We have one school psychologist for every fifteen hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca–Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. [Closes eyes briefly] We have make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school–school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want–they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, [closes eyes tightly] the– ‘scuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, [closes eyes] a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

Notice how it gets more garbled the longer he speaks. The response I transcribed was about eighty seconds in length. That was just one small part of a debate in which the former vice president performed no better and forgot three of his fellow candidates’ names.

Compare this befuddled, incoherent mess with footage of a younger Biden, like his famous quip about how Rudy Giuliani only ever mentions “a noun and a verb and 9/11” in a sentence, or this clip where he said if Israel didn’t exist America would have to invent it to protect its interests in the Middle East. Biden has always been notoriously gaffe-prone, but he was also sharp, alert, and articulate enough to deliver a punchline. As journalist Michael Tracey has been pointing out, what we’re consistently seeing over and over again from the former vice president now are not “gaffes”, but clear signs of cognitive decline. Contrast the difference between Biden’s younger footage and what was seen at the last debate with footage of Bernie Sanders throughout the decades, who has remained virtually identical save for appearance and hoarseness. Age does not account for this difference. Biden’s brain is dying.

It is certainly understandable that people are concerned about the presidential frontrunner having a racist worldview. But what’s really weird and creepy is how few people are discussing the obvious fact that the presidential forerunner is also clearly suffering from the early stages of some kind of dementia. The brain that spouted the gibberish transcribed above would probably score poorly on a basic test for the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, yet discussion of his inability to complete a coherent sentence is relegated to the margins of political discourse. This is someone who is campaigning to have access to the nuclear codes, yet we’re only talking about how he’s kind of racist and not about the fact that his brain is turning into Swiss cheese right before our eyes. It’s freaky.

It’s freaky, but it kind of makes sense. One common difficulty in getting early treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease is that those suffering from it often go to great lengths to hide their impairments, and another difficulty is that their families are often deeply in denial about their loved one’s mental decline. According to the Mayo Clinic, “Some people hide their symptoms, or family members cover for them. That’s easy to understand, because Alzheimer’s dementia is associated with loss, such as loss of independence, loss of a driving privileges and loss of self.”

I think we’re seeing precisely this happening, both with Biden, and with his supporters. Biden himself is clearly doing everything he can to feign mental competency, and as a powerful politician aiming to accomplish a lifelong ambition to become the US president he’d certainly have a lot egoically invested in doing so. His supporters seem to be doing all kinds of denial mental gymnastics around his cognitive decline as well; just check out the responses to this Washington Post tweet for its article about Biden’s “record player” response.

Here are a few examples:

“Don’t pretend you didn’t understand what he was saying.”

“Actually, I recently saw a turntable for sale at Best Buys & vinyl records are back on the market. Try to keep up, WaPo.”

“My 22 year old son and all his friends play records on record players these days. If you’re insinuating that Joe is out of touch, you’re out of touch.”

“Actually currently, there are some people playing record players because they find the vinyl record has better sound quality. I think you are just picking and choosing who to go after.”

“He was saying they not hearing enough words. We did. We were read to. We listened to children’s albums. We had conversations. He was trying to get at the importance of those things. He didn’t do a great job on communicating it but he was right.”

“Twitter snark aside, there are studies to back up that claim.”

“He got 80% of the way through the debate without an embarrassing gaffe that highlights his age. Of course, Trump couldn’t get halfway through a debate without threatening his opponent with imprisonment.”

“Honestly…so what. I got the sentiment.”

“Not sure why people are being so condescending. Vinyl outsold CD last year, so, you know, record players are everywhere these days. You could say he’s stuck in the past or you could say he’s trending. Be kind.”

We saw this same impulse to protect and compensate for Biden’s mental decline from audience members during the debate, who gasped out loud when Julian Castro suggested that Biden had forgotten what he’d said two minutes ago. Many rank-and-file Democrats are so desperate for an end to an administration that is making them increasingly anxious and neurotic that they find it cognitively easier to compartmentalize away from the obvious fact that Biden is in a state of mental decline than to turn and face that reality. So they make excuses and pretend that his demented word salads are perfectly rational, hip references to the resurging popularity of vinyl records.

The only people who are absolutely acutely aware of Biden’s cognitive decline and yet still want him to become president are his handlers. There is no way his consistent pattern of verbal unintelligibility has gone unnoticed by those who are responsible for facilitating his election, and indeed The Hill reports that his “allies” have been floating the idea of scaling back his campaign appearances and scheduling them for earlier in the day when he’s not tired to help minimize his “verbal flubs”. These people are aware that Biden is losing his mind, but they are pushing him toward the White House anyway.

If Biden supporters were really intellectually honest with themselves about what’s going on, they’d see that they don’t actually want Joe Biden to be president, they want his unelected, unaccountable handlers to be president. From a position of intellectual honesty they’d be taking the position of arch neocon Bill Kristol, who once said he’d “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

And of course that wouldn’t be a first among US presidents even in recent history. Ronald Reagan had early signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his presidency according to his own son, and George W Bush was infamously just a puppet of his handlers like Dick Cheney. Indeed it would be possible to have an actual, literal Jim Henson puppet as president of the United States without America’s unelected power establishment skipping a single beat.

But that’s exactly the point: having a real human being in there with even a semi-functional mind can put some inertia on the most sociopathic impulses of America’s unelected permanent government. Both Trump and Obama are of course horrible presidents who have continued and expanded the Bush administration’s most evil agendas, but Obama slowed down the push to arm Ukraine against Russia and slammed the brakes on a full-scale bombing campaign on Syria, while Trump was unable to get along with John Bolton and is losing interest in Venezuela while resisting the push to start new wars. Despite all their flaws, they’ve resisted the permanent government’s worst impulses in some key ways. If it’s just Biden’s handlers and the unelected power establishment, there’s no humanity anywhere near the brake pedal.

https://twitter.com/BetaODork/status/1164553547960246272

So this makes sense to talk about no matter how you look at it. But we’re not. In mainstream discourse we’re speaking as though this is just a charmingly gaffe-prone old man who makes a few controversial statements from time to time but would still make a fine president, when really he shouldn’t even be allowed a driver’s license.

And I just find that really creepy and uncomfortable. As someone who’s never been able to leave elephants in rooms alone, the fact that the leading presidential contender is neurologically incapable of speaking coherently for eighty seconds sticks out like dog’s balls and it’s absolutely freakish that this isn’t front and center of our political discourse right now. Biden’s dementia should be the very first thing we discuss whenever his name comes up, not the last.

 

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Saturday Matinee: Trust

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“Trust” (1990) is an independent comedy written and directed by Hal Hartley about the relationship between misfits Maria (Adrienne Shelly) and Matthew (Martin Donovan) who are equally alienated in their stifling Long Island town. Equal parts stylized and realistic with a focus on the struggle to live with intelligence and integrity in a society hostile towards such traits, Trust is a quintessential Hal Hartley film.

Watch the full film on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11374855

RFK Jr. Slams Gov’t & Big Pharma In Eye Opening Speech About Forced Vaccinations

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By Arjun Walla

Source: Collective Evolution

California has very strict compulsory vaccination laws for children in school, and as a result more parents are deciding to homeschool their children. The latest information regarding vaccines in California that’s making noise is Senate Bill 276 by Senator Richard Pan. The bill eliminated nearly all vaccine medical exemptions. Under this bill, politicians, not physicians, are in charge of deciding whether or not children may receive medical exemptions, which in turn would determine whether or not they can attend school.

This bill, which was recently signed into law, represents medical tyranny that is similar to a police state. Forcing vaccinations on any segment of the population and taking away their freedom of choice is ridiculous. All of this is done under the assumption that unvaccinated children pose a danger to vaccinated children, and this is simply not true for several reasons.

Herd immunity is a largely theoretical concept, yet for decades, it has furnished one of the key underpinnings for vaccine mandates in the United States. The public health establishment borrowed the herd immunity concept from pre-vaccine observations of natural disease outbreaks. Then, without any apparent supporting science, officials applied the concept to vaccination, using it not only to justify mass vaccination but to guilt-trip anyone objecting to the nation’s increasingly onerous vaccine mandates.

In a 2014 analysis in the Oregon Law Review by New York University (NYU) legal scholars Mary Holland and Chase E. Zachary (who also has a Princeton-conferred doctorate in chemistry), the authors show that 60 years of compulsory vaccine policies “have not attained herd immunity for any childhood disease.” It is time, they suggest, to cast aside coercion in favor of voluntary choice.

This is true, in fact, there has been a history of disease outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations. I wrote an article not long ago providing multiple studies showing this, and the studies are elaborated on and linked in that article, which you can go through here.

According to a MedAlerts search of the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database as of 2/5/19, the cumulative raw count of adverse events from measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines alone was: 93,929 adverse events, 1,810 disabilities, 6,902 hospitalizations, and 463 deaths. What is even more disturbing about these numbers is that VAERS is a voluntary and passive reporting system that has been found to only capture 1% of adverse events.

How can vaccines produce herd immunity if they’re not safe for everybody? It’s impossible.

The various forms of vaccine failure not only make herd immunity impossible to achieve, but also feed the occurrence of “vaccine-preventable illnesses” in highly or even fully vaccinated populations. There are numerous examples of this in published literature, again, some of which I link and go into greater detail about measles here.

Vaccines Aren’t Safe For Everyone

It’s no secret that vaccines are not completely safe for everyone, it’s clearly not a ‘one size fits all’ product, and that’s evident by the fact that nearly $4 billion has been paid out to families of vaccine injured children via the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). As astronomical as the monetary awards are, they’re even more alarming when you consider that only an estimated 1% of vaccine injuries are even reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). If the numbers from VAERS are correct – only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated – then up to 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported and the families of the vast majority of people injured by vaccines are picking up the costs, once again, for vaccine makers’ flawed products.

This completely debunks the validity of herd immunity.

Speech From Kennedy

While California’s tragic fall into what might rightly be described as a Medical Police State has many up in arms, RFK Jr. spontaneously delivered a speech outside Gov. Newsom’s office, helping to transform the anger and grief experienced by thousands of shaken onlookers into inspiration and hope, no doubt catalyzing further what is clearly becoming this country’s next grassroots civil rights movement.

In the astoundingly powerful and uplifting speech by RFK Jr. below, one senses the historical importance of what just transpired. And that the fall of California into medical fascism also marks the beginning of a new, broad-based civil rights movement, including all sexes, races, walks of life, religions, and socioeconomic classes — as it concerns the primary, inviolable human right of bodily self-sovereignty and health freedom, and a parent’s right to make informed health choices for their children, which can have life and death consequences. [From the Youtube video description]

Another Informative Statement From Kennedy

Via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Merck introduced its measles vaccine in 1963, claiming the vaccine would convey lifelong immunity equivalent to a natural infection, with health officials promising that 55% vaccine coverage would produce “herd immunity” sufficient to eradicate measles by 1967.

Leading scientists of the day, including the world’s preeminent bacteriologist, Sir Graham Wilsonand Harvard Virologist John Enders, who first isolated measles, warned against introducing a vaccine unless it provided lifelong immunity. Measles, they cautioned, would rebound with increased virulence and mortality as the vaccine forced the evolution of more virulent strains and shifted outbreaks away from children—biologically evolved to handle measles—to the elderly who could die from pneumonia, and young infants now unequipped with maternal immunity.

A 1984 Johns Hopkins University modeling study predicted that Merck’s population-wide experiment would increase measles outbreaks by 2050, (when the last generation subject to natural immunity died off,) compared to the pre-vaccine era. This is exactly what has happened. Merck’s vaccine, with a growing failure rate has been incapable of abolishing the disease. Vaccine failure has left millions of adult Californians effectively unvaccinated. And 79% of people affected by measles in this year’s California outbreak were adults.

When eradication predictably didn’t materialize and measles attacked fully-vaccinated populations, Merck simply moved the goalpost saying that herd immunity required 75% vaccination, then 85%, then 95%, then 98%. And now 99%. To distract the world’s citizens from its failed vaccine, Merck started blaming “anti-vaxxers.” (The Vaccine Safety Movement)

California’s bought or brain-dead lawmakers are proposing to “fix” Merck’s vaccine failure problem by punishing 4,000 vulnerable children with medical exemptions. In an act of legislative savagery, Democratic politicians propose to forcibly vaccinate children whose doctors have told them that a vaccine could kill or severely injure them. SB276 will not fix the measles outbreak or solve the problem of vaccine failure, it will only reward a corrupt company for a defective product.

The Takeaway

The idea that politicians can force children to be vaccinated, including those deemed to be in danger of severe adverse reactions, and strip them of their rights to attend public school is insane. Freedom of choice and medical freedom should always exist, especially with regards to vaccines. If parents want to vaccinate, fine, but parents who wish to not vaccinate their children for whatever reasons should always have the freedom to do so.

Mandatory vaccination is tyrannical.

“The fight for liberty and health freedom in California is far from over. There will be legal challenges,” said RFK. Jr., “all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary. In fact, this incident brings to the forefront a deep, dark problem in the United States that has been festering for decades: the rise of the Pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the government to mandate products that the free market would otherwise reject, due to the profound liability these products have now underwritten completely by the government via their indemnification through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVIA) of 1986. Now, over three decades since the inception of NVICA, that same industry is starting to use the police powers of the state to enforce these mandates.” [Taken from the Youtube description in the video posted above]

Pentagon Joins the War on Alternative Media

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

Fake news is so threatening to America’s national security, the Pentagon’s DARPA research agency has announced it will launch a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” according to Bloomberg.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society.

As usual, a translation is in order. DARPA is working on a system that will prevent news and analysis contrary to the establishment narrative from rising above the mosh pit that is the lower depths of social media.

U.S. officials have been working on plans to prevent outside hackers from flooding social channels with false information ahead of the 2020 election. The drive has been hindered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider election-security legislation. Critics have labeled him #MoscowMitch, saying he left the U.S. vulnerable to meddling by Russia, prompting his retort of “modern-day McCarthyism.”

It should be obvious there isn’t any “election-security.” Even with alleged Russian interference—which has zero credibility and is remarkably evidence-free—can’t overcome the fact the election system is rigged in favor of the establishment’s handpicked “public service” careerists. Bernie Sanders knows about this and Tulsi Gabbard is learning.

No amount of “fake news” will change or even marginally impact the system. An astute eleven-year-old, after examining the evidence or lack thereof, would conclude the Russians are not hijacking elections. That job is left up to the DNC, RNC, and the corporate propaganda media.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations that dubious content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google aided his election win. Hillary Clinton supporters claimed a flood of fake items may have helped sway the results in 2016.

Hillary Clinton followers are simply sore losers. In order to push the fallacy we live in a pluralistic democracy, the state provides the appropriate cover to effectively obfuscate the “deep fake” that is performed every election cycle.

This cover allowed Donald Trump to win the election. Trump didn’t collude with the Russians, he didn’t need to. He took advantage of the widespread discontent of the American people and promised the Make America Great Again.

Beyond Trump’s egotistical flourishes and daily tweet diatribes against enemies real and imagined, he has done little to move the MAGA agenda forward. He is little different than his predecessors—the national debt is in the stratosphere, the wars continue and expand, and the Federal Reserve scam of pumping up the stock market to make it appear all’s well while facilitating the upward shift of wealth to the elite.

But never mind that.

“Where things get especially scary is the prospect of malicious actors combining different forms of fake content into a seamless platform. Researchers can already produce convincing fake videos, generate persuasively realistic text, and deploy chatbots to interact with people. Imagine the potential persuasive impact on vulnerable people that integrating these technologies could have: an interactive deepfake of an influential person engaged in AI-directed propaganda on a bot-to-person basis,” Andrew Grotto at the Center for International Security at Stanford University told Bloomberg.

Because “vulnerable people” are supposedly at risk, the state and its agencies are prepared to implement some sort of fantastical (and likely ineffectual) AI solution to stop unacceptable content from going viral.

The target is not Russians per se, it’s millions of American citizens the state and its secret political police, the FBI, are attempting to prevent from participating in social media and the larger political discussion that is ostensibly democratic but is, in fact, a form of hippodroming, that is to say rigging the political process for a favored outcome by the fixers.

Meanwhile, the state and its Silicon Valley partners are picking off targets one by one, the latest victim being Daniel McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute. His account was permanently suspended for the crime of criticizing Sean Hannity.

“They said I would not be reinstated. My crime? I called Sean Hannity ‘retarded.’ But do a Twitter search on use of the term and you will see its use millions of times with impunity,” McAdams emailed Robert Wenzel after the suspension.

The corporate propaganda media has marginalized dozens of people and ruined careers and reputations by characterizing them as white nationalists, peddlers of fake news and conspiracy theories, and now, directly from the FBI, as national security threats, evil conspiracy-bearing domestic terrorists bent on filling every American head with the illusion of “deep fakes,” fomenting and spreading lies, misinformation, participating in Russian collusion, and keeping company with bad actors (paid agents or dupes for Russia) steering the nation into a white supremacist nightmare.

I was wrong about Hillary. I thought she’d win the election hands-down with the help of the Deep State and its media. I’m making another prediction, but I could be wrong again.

Donald Trump will be roundly defeated next November.

If Democrats take control of the House and Senate, we will witness an inquisition against those of us not on-narrative, beginning with revenge exacted on hardcore MAGA supporters. How effective this jihad is will remain to be seen.

As we have witnessed over the last few months, the state is serious about taking back the narrative and disallowing any contrary narratives put out by “bad actors,” largely libertarians like Daniel McAdams, dissidents on the “New Right,” and disillusioned former MAGAites opposed to endless war and a bankster-dominated state drifting into total authoritarian control freak mode.